DBWI: Lunar Race did not end with a Photo-Finish?

[Bahamut-255]

A question I've been meaning to ask for some time now, but given that it's been about 45 years since the first Lunar Landing I think this is the right time.

IOTL, there was a very tight margin of victory with regards to the First Man on the Moon - about 40 minutes IIRC - which saw NASA (USA) scrape through to "take the prize". So the question is this:

What if the margin of victory was considerably wider? Say, a few months? Or even if one of the two opposing sides never even made it? What would this mean for the future of Space Exploration?

 

[Statesman]

Probably slowed down a lot. The Soviets essentially challenged the US to a rematch in their trying to reach Mars. If one side makes it with a more considerable margin, maybe that doesn't happen and we might not make it to Mars until 1980 or 1990.

 

[CthulhuFhtagn]

Probably slowed down a lot. The Soviets essentially challenged the US to a rematch in their trying to reach Mars. If one side makes it with a more considerable margin, maybe that doesn't happen and we might not make it to Mars until 1980 or 1990.

Probably would have been better for the Soviets. Losing the race to the moon was bad enough, but the way the US beat them to Mars by almost a year must have been pretty rough on Moscow. Then, to add insult to injury, the USSR itself collapsed.

USA 3, Russians 0.

 

[Statesman]

Maybe the USSR would survive to the modern day? Especially if it was them who ended up finishing first. Although I'm sure President Kennedy's aggressive foreign policy in the late sixties and first half of the seventies didn't help the stability of the Soviet Union when we finally made it to Mars under Reagan in '77. And Reagan was probably even more aggressive than Kennedy! But when they collapsed in '83, that cemented his legacy. But I digress.

I remember reading that President Nixon's very public commitment to beating the Soviet Union to the Moon in the early 60s created a bigger sense of urgency in the USSR to get to the Moon, so maybe if you butterfly that (maybe Johnson ends up winning in 1960, instead) then it wouldn't be as close a margin? I'm sure Johnson would still want to push for it, and we might still get there by '69, but Nixon made the Gemini and Apollo programs national symbols.

Without the Soviets finishing so close behind us, Kennedy might not have wanted to push on to Mars... Maybe he starts building a more permanent moon base in the early seventies instead of us having to wait until the late eighties for a permanent lunar settlement? But that in exchange for not going to Mars? I'm not sure which I prefer.

 

[GeographyDude]

Without the second race to Mars, we may not have had the rotating space stations by 1989. But it's such a logical thing to do, I kind of think we would have.

As more than one person has pointed out, if you have families raising children on Mars, you're going to end up with a lot of angry teenagers! More seriously, people who grow up in Mar's 1/3 gravity can never come to Earth and real ethical questions of whether you want to do that.

And the rotating stations with their full Earth gravity at the edges are such a logical solution, I think we would have had to hit upon it anyway.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Good Grief!! Yet another Conspiracy Theorist!!! Sheesh!

Honestly. The Moon Landing DID happen. It was NOT a PhotoFinish(tm) job.

Edit: Oops. Sorry, looked past the title this time. I just get so mad when people claim those pictures were faked.


OOC: TTL, 'PhotoFinish' is an image editing software package like OTL's PhotoShop.

 

[Miss Teri]

Well, perhaps we would not have such a robust space program that we do today. Many of the technology and experience gained during the Mars race was later used in the Grand Tour Probes, which allowed us to view in detail the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Without the push for Mars, I doubt unmanned exploration would be as advanced as it is. Even the Venus probes had that same technology.

 

[SactoMan101]

If I remember correctly, the Russians could have lost the race to the Moon had Sergei P. Korolev not survived that nearly-botched medical operation in early 1966.

But Korolev fortunately did survive, and through sheer force of leadership manage to get the N-1 launcher program working by early 1968. Interestingly, from the 2014 perspective, the biggest problem that had to be overcome with the N-1 was the third stage with its really finicky rocket engine, which ended up being redesigned to finally work correctly by fall 1968 (the first Soviet lunar manned orbital flight happened just three weeks after Apollo 8's historical flight in December 1968).

 

[Statesman]

If I remember correctly, the Russians could have lost the race to the Moon had Sergei P. Korolev not survived that nearly-botched medical operation in early 1966.

But Korolev fortunately did survive, and through sheer force of leadership manage to get the N-1 launcher program working by early 1968. Interestingly, from the 2014 perspective, the biggest problem that had to be overcome with the N-1 was the third stage with its really finicky rocket engine, which ended up being redesigned to finally work correctly by fall 1968 (the first Soviet lunar manned orbital flight happened just three weeks after Apollo 8's historical flight in December 1968).

Well, they technically did lose... Even if it was just 40 minutes.

 

[1.36]

OOCeople are claiming the USSR collapsed and yet other are claiming it's still alive today...things aren't right here lol

 

[CthulhuFhtagn]

OOCeople are claiming the USSR collapsed and yet other are claiming it's still alive today...things aren't right here lol

OOC: Welcome to DBWIs, where everyone tries to create their own universe regardless of what the OP or other people in the thread have already posted.

 

[Bahamut-255]

OOCeople are claiming the USSR collapsed and yet other are claiming it's still alive today...things aren't right here lol

OOC: Welcome to DBWIs, where everyone tries to create their own universe regardless of what the OP or other people in the thread have already posted.

OOC: CthulhuFhtagn was the first one who posted the USSR collapse in the third post and Statesman provided the date of some point in 1983 right after. Therefore ITTL, the USSR collapsed at some point in 1983.

IC: Honestly, I think it was the sheer expense of trying to maintain parity with the US in both their Military and Space Exploration that did them in. I would say drop one of the two and they may last longer, maybe even hold up, but post-collapse, the sheer failings of their entire economic model, I'm not so sure.